


Only Sort of Haunted

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Kamisama Hajimemashita | Kamisama Kiss
Genre: F/M, Field Trip, Friendship, Gen, Halloween Event 2017, Loneliness, Mizuki got himself mistaken for a drowning victim??, Yonomori Shrine, ghost story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 09:34:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12578788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: There was a lake people hurried past, in that place, because a man had walked into the water there and never come back.(Mizuki has become part of a ghost story, whether he knows it or not.  Also, Nanami takes her daycare class to visit the lake that used to be Yonomori Shrine.  This takes place somewhere between Nanami's wedding and the epilogue.)





	Only Sort of Haunted

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, first time doing anything for this fandom! My friend Brittany got me into this manga/anime a while ago and it was on my mind after I finished reading it… I was hunting around tumblr for stuff about it when I saw a Halloween event. So. I hope you enjoy this, if you read it~ Sorry for anything I got wrong! :D HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

There was a lake people hurried past, in that place, because a man had walked into the water there and never come back.  A group of school girls having lunch together saw him, peeking out from between the brambles, chopsticks balanced loosely in their hands.  One of them, a brave girl, called, “Hey!   Hey, you!  What’re you doing?” but the man didn’t seem to hear her.  He had a soft face, beatific and calm, and hair bleached very white.  Whiter than bone just picked clean, whiter than the frozen sky.  The way that cold, watery daylight hit him made it seem as though there were scales crawling up his neck, for just a moment, one of the girls said.  Another girl, of course, swore he was human as anyone.  She said he was crying, and muttering something she couldn’t quite hear.  It reminded her of a spell, although she couldn’t say why.

They searched for a body, those cops with their caution tape and their pasted-on reassurances.  “Nothing to see here, Miss.  Move along, move along.” 

Nobody found anything, of course.  A man had walked into the water, and there was no sign of him anywhere.  There were the remains of a small shrine at the bottom of the lake, though, drowned and rotting and almost – but not quite – forgotten.  Fish darted through that shrine, glinting silver like flipped coins.  People whispered.  Yonomori Shrine and its goddess had meant to save people from drowning, but now it, too, had drowned, and a strange pale man with it.

The lake had been a new thing, then, only ever around at all because the city planners had decided to build a dam.  It had been a novelty for those girls to picnic there.  But no picnics came, not anymore.

It was very cold and quiet around that lake, and by the time Nanami Momozono took her daycare class visiting on a field trip nobody talked about it much at all.  Except around Halloween or other especially eerie nights, maybe, when kids would dare each other to creep up close to the water.  It was just understood that the lake was haunted, and that it might drink you up so no one would ever find your bones.  Or maybe the pale man would watch you, lips curving up ever so slightly as his eyes blurred over with tears.  Maybe.  And who knew what he would do then, if you stayed too long?  

It was an old story, and the people of that town had a lot of other more practical things to think about.

Nanami was a bright young woman with a ribbon in her hair, that day, and nobody she was working with knew any of her secrets.  She had a once-fox husband waiting for her at home, yes.  She had known what it was to tie fates together the way another god might, and she genuinely thought it would be fun to bring little sailboats and sketchpads and visit the lake on a nature hike.  She sent home permission slips and plotted a course – she planned to stop for ice cream, and at a small museum.   Her class rode into town in a bus, chattering and scribbling with crayons.  She had appointed chaperones in neon vests and the whole deal.  People said Nanami had an infectious enthusiasm, and she had seemed dead sure none of her little charges could fall into that particular lake.  Something, she hinted, wouldn’t have let them.

So maybe Nanami just loved nature and was happy to help plan adventures.  Maybe.  That might have explained it all.  Really, she wanted to show an old friend that she was thinking about him, but nobody could have known that part.  She wanted to stare out over the water and remember waking up beneath it, in a bubble of perfectly preserved time.  A pale man had puzzled down at her, then, as if he wasn’t quite sure how to talk to living things anymore but was so, so desperate to try.  The shrine had been polished and warm, so different from the lake around it.

She hadn’t known Mizuki was a ghost story, at first, and by the time she figured it out she felt sorry for him.  Mizuki would later tell her that if he had been hearing the story from her perspective, knowing everything she knew, he would have expected her to be afraid.  She’d just been taken away from her home, after all.  He’d wanted to be with her forever and they’d only just met.  Of course someone so clutching could have been dangerous.  Of course he would have wanted her to keep herself safe, normally, and respected, and able to feel the sun on her skin if she wanted to.  He hadn’t liked what he was becoming there in the dark without his goddess.

Mizuki looked very self-conscious, for a second, then, guilty and drunk and remembering back through a haze.  He had been so different, beneath his lake, than he became when they were living together like family.  Desperation and emptiness warped people in awful ways.  Part of why Mizuki loved her so completely, he had said, was that she helped him wiggle out of that bitter, aching self and become who he was supposed to be again.  He wanted to be the guy she trusted. 

He hadn’t remembered what he told her, by the time morning came.  She’d made sure he ate breakfast, and Tomoe teased him for drinking too much.       

That same Tomoe, the once-fox, said, “Tsk,” with a little smirk when Nanami told him about how she was going to the lake.  He’d reminded her that she wouldn’t be able to see Mizuki without Mikage’s godhood, at least not so far from the shrine they’d shared together.  Nanami said she knew, sure, yeah, but that _he’d_ be able to see _her_ , if he was still around.  Still monitoring the shrine of his first goddess that had dreamt him into being.  He’d probably want to know he hadn’t been forgotten.

Tomoe was doing up a tie in the mirror, about then.  He tossed her a velvety glance over his shoulder and murmured that she might be right this time.  The fan by the bed was whooshing past him every few seconds, ruffling his hair.  Without any fox ears nestled in it, now, but all his expressions were so much the same as they had always been.   He told her he would have dinner ready when she got home, and she followed him to the door to kiss him slowly on his way out and into the world again.   

None of Nanami’s students knew to be afraid of Mizuki’s first home until they stopped at the town’s little museum and one of the guides stretched her eyes wider and asked why they’d want to go to _that_ lake.  Spirits might have been angry, there, and people made up stories about stuff that floated up along the shore.  Bones and old jewelry, engraved stones and stuff like that.  Stuff for stories.  Only maybe they _didn’t_ make it all up – who could say?  Maybe that lake really was hungry.

A little boy started crying, then, mouth scrunching up and arms tucked tight around himself.  A little girl dropped the souvenir picture book she’d been holding, and one of the pages got crinkled up on the floor.  A haunted lake?  Their teacher was taking them to a _haunted lake_?  Why?

Nanami had learned to think fast, working at a daycare.  No, she’d learned to think fast working as a land god, and as her deadbeat father’s daughter.  She’d always been able to innovate, to take knotted threads and sort them out tenderly between her hands.  She scooped up the picture book; she pulled tissues out of her purse for the crying boy like she was performing a magic trick.

And then she flopped down on the floor of the gift shop and told a story about a flooded shrine, to whatever kids wanted to hear it.  She talked about a lonely place that was still very beautiful – she talked about how many interesting fish and bugs would be around that lake, because not a lot of kids came by there anyway.  She talked about how strange it was to know there was a whole place under the water, like a sunken Atlantis, like a pirate horde.  When she offered to turn their bus around and hit up a neighborhood park instead, her class was mostly too busy talking about catching fish in their hands and which ones among them would have made decent pirates to answer her.  They were brave, they said.  It was still so light out, and they were going to have fun and be braver than that guide lady.

There was a low, sick feeling deep inside Nanami, thinking about Mizuki and his lake as haunted, as the kind of frightening that would have conspiracy theory blogs posting about it online.  This same Mizuki had read the romance novels she’d brought home, lounging around the shrine.  He’d held her arm walking together, like he was scared to lose hold of her.  His voice was so often bubbly and warm, slender fingers flashing around as he talked.  He wore his calculating, venom-soaked smiles, sometimes, but in his defense they’d been pretty close to dying a bunch of times there.  Mizuki’d planned her whole wedding, too, even though no one could send him a decent RSVP.  As a snake – because yes, his other self was a snake, and he _did_ shed his skin around the shrine every now and again ticking Tomoe off to no end – it had always looked like he was smiling.  Snake mouths curled up like that, sometimes.  

She sort of hoped none of her class would talk about the drowned specter of that lake too loudly, as they spent a little afternoon there.  When the woman at the museum had described Mizuki like that, a stranger who dissolved to water and rubble in the dark, Nanami thought she could imagine the exact expression he would have been wearing as he gave himself to the lake.  Giving up, going home.  He would have been determined and resigned and furious beyond belief.  Maybe he knew people had seen him and told stories, still, or maybe he would smack himself on the forehead and hiss through his teeth if he found out. 

Nanami played pirates, and she helped kids collect nature collages from the area around the lake.  They pasted leaves and twigs and smooth stones down on cardboard paper, and she helped them sign their names at the bottom with all the right kanji.  Once, she thought she saw fresh bone-white scales sharp against the mud, twining close to her foot and then – as if shy, as if reconsidering because of all the people around – away and into the water.  Another time she thought she saw a flowering tree reflected deep inside that lake where no tree could rightly be.  And both those times she smiled, and she tasted tears in the back of her throat.  The air was crisp and not quite cold, then.  She had to keep sending chaperones back to the bus for extra sweaters.  The sky was heavy and silver-grey, like it was always thinking about rain. 

It could have been one of the chaperones who wrote “It’s so, so good to see you” on the back of Nanami’s notebook when her back was turned.  It could have been, but she really didn’t think it was.


End file.
